I think you're onto something Avery. In chap. 7 of THE GEOMETRY OF
VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY, "Speaking Freely With Children as a Path to
Peace," I describe it in terms of
three-person interaction, actually three ways my wife, daughter and I
approached her going to bed. I refer the scenarios back to the
tetrahedronal model I derive in the chap. 5 presentation of the model
of distinguishing peaceful from violent interaction, drawing
from Buckminster Fuller. One of the terms I use for what I otherwise
call democratic or tetrahedronal interaction is resonance.
It's a little egotistical, I suppose, to suggest that you, Avery, or
someone else might want to look at the book, but I do hesitate to
describe it all rather than illustrating it, as I in effect do in my
New World Order Diary entries and in the feminist justice seminar
letters, or as I apply it in for example now helping a computer
consultant in limbo clear himself and get his job back.
What I have noticed is that we have two bodies of knowledge, of
cathexis, in our souls--one of how to win games of domination, and one
of how to democratize interaction in which we participate. Over the
past seven years or so, as I have become conscious of the other body
of knowledge we seldom use here and now in public discourse, I have
discovered what a wealth of low-visibility experience and skill there
is in living peacefully. Within this body of knowledge, conflicts
become assets, ways to learn, rather than contests. Confrontation of
the personal source of one's fears is the first principle of this form
of interaction, rather than separation as in the war models of
knowledge.
I am, as I wrote in the syllabus that started my participation in
csg-l, aware of my own violence. I have discovered in myself a
capacity imagining myself in others' places doing very brutal things.
Among other things I believe that capacity for understanding led a
student in my big class, as we discussed the Gulf War, to describe
what he perceived and felt when as an EMT in the Navy Seals he knifed
an Iraqi soldier to death as he tried to rescue one of his own. He
compared the warmth that came from the victim as he died to that he
had felt in many others he had tried to save before. Among other
things, the student allowed me to illustrate the mistake many of us
who grew up in the sixties believe we made--to villify returning
soldiers as killers rather than welcoming them home from perilous
circumstances in which they felt any number of irresistible forces to
kill. I'm nearly 49, and no one of the many combat soldiers I have met has
ever given me the gift of understanding what it means to kill in other
than disembodied terms or in the kind of excitement I infer rapists
experience. Last week I had read a six-page letter a rape survivor
in the class had given me to read anonymously. I guess that the rate
of this capacity of students to contribute to what we all learn about
violence and control is rather extraordinary, and suppose that my
conscious application of tetrahedronal principles has something to do
with the result.
PCT quite cogently describes one of my bodies of knowledge, that of
how to survive as a warrior. That side is important to know about
too. Here I go again. I'm thinking my world and that of PCT-ists can
be connected; in return I keep hearing messages of separation, of what
sets PCT apart. Do you see the issue?
By the way, Chris Wickens and I were on the same little high-school
wrestling team, where I learned how much I hated competition. Given
that I grew up believing Chris's dad was the major figure in
psychology, recent correspondence on Chris (who was a year behind me
in school) reminds me of how many years lie behind me. l&p hal